How a remarkable car came to spark, to glow, and to fade. And how it may glow once again.

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BMW meant the M1 to be the foremost expression of its automotive art. The M1 was also intended to win races. The car’s name personifies its stature: “M” designates all BMW engineering projects of substance, and “1” signifies this project’s importance in BMW engineering history.

But between the birth of the M1 con­cept in mid-1975 and the end of pro­duction in December 1980, something happened. The M1 was created to rep­resent BMW in a then new Manufactur­ers Championship based on cars with production silhouettes. Before the M1 could take the field, however, the pen­dulum of public opinion that had swung away from purebred prototype sports cars and toward production cars in the early Seventies had swung back again. Silhouette cars were obsolete by 1980. The M1, built expressly to homologate the ultimate silhouette race car, suddenly became obsolete. At the same time, Jochen Neerpasch, the man responsible for BMW's racing prestige during the Seventies and the man behind the M1, became an orphan of this storm as well, his career at BMW doomed because of the controversy surrounding this car. In short, the M1's story is wrapped up in the drawbacks of what was thought to be the best hope for a worldwide road­-racing revival during the Seventies, the silhouette car.

Neerpasch and the M1 were identified with each other from the beginning. He came to BMW in 1972 and created a semi-autonomous company for racing, BMW Motorsports GmbH. Soon the 3.0 CSL coupe became the dominant force in the European Touring Car Championship. But by 1975 the CSL was obso­lete on the production line as well as for the new Group 5–based World Championship of Makes. Neerpasch's solution was to revive BMW's mid-engined sports-car concept, a project that dates back to 1972, when Paul Bracq designed and built the BMW Turbo show car around a chassis with a mid-mounted turbocharged 2002 four-cylinder. (BMW actually began experimentation with turbocharging long before Porsche.) BMW had initially rejected the concept to concentrate on its new generation of sedans, but the car seemed persuasive as the basis for a racing program.

As the project emerged, the E26 (en­gineering concept 26) would be designed by Giugiaro and his Ital Design staff around the proven CSL racing engine. Lamborghini would build 400 cars, making the design eligible for Group 4 racing. Once homologation was completed, a turbocharged version of the CSL six-cylinder would be fitted to the factory race car, and, went the plan, the winning would commence.

Lamborghini’s financial problems postponed the start of production beyond the original 1977 deadline, so BMW Motorsports hastily created the racing 320i for Group 5 competition. Although the M1 was formally announced soon after (January 1978), Lamborghini’s imminent bankruptcy finally forced BMW to cancel its contract on April 20, 1978. Under a new plan, Marchese would build the car's tube frame, TIR would mold the fiberglass, and then Ital Design would mate the two and install the interior. The cars would then be shipped from Italy to Stuttgart, where Baur, long a builder of BMW production prototypes, would in­stall the BMW hardware. BMW Motor­sports would do the final preparation in Munich—in fact, the car would carry a BMW Motorsports manufacturing plate.

To salvage BMW's prestige on the racetrack in the meantime, Neerpasch announced in July 1978 that BMW had sold an IROC-type series, called Procar, to the Formula One Constructors Association. The top-five qualifiers in each Formula 1 race would take the helm of BMW-prepared M1s and compete against a field of fifteen privateers also in M1s. BMW Motorsports prepared for this undertaking with a $2.5 million re­development of its Preussenstrasse fa­cility that gave it a showroom, work­shops, dyno rooms, offices, and a work force of 160—all the trappings of an independent carmaker. A concerned BMW management also installed a co-director with Neerpasch to oversee the company’s finances.

The M1 finally took to the racetrack in 1979, but failure dogged it from the first. The Procar series brought mixed reviews, providing a show of brilliance but also evidence of early engine problems. The Group 4 entries at the Watkins Glen and Le Mans endurance races failed. Furthermore no turbo was ready for the M1’s M88 engine, because all work had been focused on McLaren’s turbocharged four-cylinder for the 320i. So even when Neerpasch commissioned a special Group 5 M1 from March later in 1979, the wildly illegal car that resulted was underpowered. A similar version raced by Jim Busby in America ultimately suffered the indignity of being fitted with a Chevrolet small-block V-8.

The project’s failure had become complete by 1980. The budget of BMW Motorsports had been slashed nearly 75 percent. The Procar contract was sold to England’s BS Fabrications. Under attack internally for diverting engineering effort from street cars, and yet anxious to develop the turbo four-cylinder for Formula 1, Neerpasch left BMW Motorsports. Everyone understood that the M1 had failed as a race car because its development proved too costly and could not keep pace with changes in racing regulations—two important failures in silhouette racing, as any IMSA or NASCAR competitor will attest.

The production of the M1 halted in December 1980 at 430 cars—35 to 40 of which were race cars. Since family sedans had saved BMW from bankruptcy in the early Sixties—not exotics like the 507 sports car—BMW saw little reason to perpetuate the M1 in the face of what it saw as a declining market for exotics.

Yet BMW and Neerpasch have left a remarkable monument to automotive excellence behind them, as the following tests of a standard M1 and Dave Cowart's M1 racer will reveal. The M1 is just what Neerpasch always said it would be: "a normal car, but normal at a higher speed than other cars." And now that the market for exotics is expanding, we can only hope that Alpina's efforts to revive the production of a revised and refined M1 will be successful. The M1 might have been the right car at the wrong time, but every driver deserves a turn at the wheel of what is probably the best fast car ever built.